SE: pacifism with big army?

[Drake007]

Being more of a cottage spam guy, i decided to try out the SE recently. I tend to go heavy on the warmongering with it, since it doesnt seem ideal for space race and i play on high levels anyhow (emperor/immortal, epic). Obviously pacifism works great with an SE, but not with a big army, which i pretty much (try to) have all game. So my question is, where do you guys feel is some kind of cutoff where pacifism is no longer worth the extra cost? In a recent game, switching to it from theocracy would have cost me 40 gold/turn in the middle ages, ugh . Thanks for your opinions and, almost forgot, i'm talking philosophical civs only here.

 

[Gnarfflinger]

One thing to remember is that Pacifism does not have an automatic upkeep of it's own, only charging you for your military units. Secondly, in a good SE, you can switch to merchants or Priests in cities with temples or shrines to increase raw gold coming in. It is doable, but you need to be vigilant in managing your civilization...

 

[CookieCutter]

[Offtopic]
Actually i dont think that Pacifism is better in SE-Economies than in Cottage Economies. This is because you will get more Great Persons if concentrate your GP-Points in one City. Thus having only one City which produces Great Persons would be the optimal strategy to maximize the total number of Great Persons you can get.
[/Offtopic]

I personally enjoy playing SE Games. I also enjoy having loads of Great Persons. so I usually stick with Pacifism as long as possible. Especially if iam not spiritual. But I think thats poor playing on my part

Most often I just adopt Free Relgion in order to calm down dangerous AIs. Add to that that Pacifism really shines when your Empire is small and your army tiny. But when the Game advances i really think that pacifism is not so good after all. The further more the game advances the longer it will take for your GPs to spawn. Most often you'll get to most GP in the early to middle stages of the game. After that running Pacifism and missing out on free exp, science or production bonus surely does not outweight a miniscule higher amount of GP over a really large time frame.
So that means that I usually try to switch out of Pacifism when the time for lightbulbing techs is over (shortly after liberalism..).
Add to that because your philosophical you dont even need pacifism to spawn some GP. The Great Persons will come to you nonetheless

 

[cabert]

I have no problem with pacifism and big army. It's not that much more expensive than high cost civic.

THe good thing about pacifism is you can focus more than one city on GPP. The National Epic is still good, but it's not overwhelming the other cities.
(300% is only 50% more than 200% = you will pop some GP in minor cities)

 

[CookieCutter]

Yes Cabert, and this can actually good and bad. Often enough i want to have different kinds of Great People. So the only way to control this, is by spreading the GP generation over different cities. By doing this however I directly impact the number of Great Persons I will receive overall. (There was a war academy article which explains this effect). Pacifism now can help to speed up the generation of a GP in a minor city. If for example I want to have a Great Engineer I can hire a forge-specialist in the Pyramid City. On the other hand i fire all specialists in my GP Farm. Thus i pretty much garantuee that i get the Engineer earlier. Pacifism can greatly help in this scenario.

 

[cabert]

Yes Cabert, and this can actually good and bad. Often enough i want to have different kinds of Great People. So the only way to control this, is by spreading the GP generation over different cities. By doing this however I directly impact the number of Great Persons I will receive overall. (There was a war academy article which explains this effect). Pacifism now can help to speed up the generation of a GP in a minor city. If for example I want to have a Great Engineer I can hire a forge-specialist in the Pyramid City. On the other hand i fire all specialists in my GP Farm. Thus i pretty much garantuee that i get the Engineer earlier. Pacifism can greatly help in this scenario.

yep, and I cannot see what's not to like...

 

[Ray Patterson]

Thanks for your opinions and, almost forgot, i'm talking philosophical civs only here.

For philosophical civs pacifism is obviously much less appealing then for non-philosophical ones.

 

[Wodan]

Doesn't Pacifism only charge you for military outside of your territory?

Wodan

 

[automator]

Yes Cabert, and this can actually good and bad.

Yes. Last game I captured the Buddhist holy city in the middle ages, but it still didn't have a shrine. 70% of the world had buddhism, so I built a temple and monastery and set it to start generating prophet points. I made sure to turn off specialists in other cities so I could get that GP quickly. Even built the National Epic there. Even so, because of population growth, the city managers started assigning specialists elsewhere, and I forgot to turn off city manager and remove those new specialists. So I got a Great Artist and a Great Scientist out of other cities before I finally got that prophet I'd been waiting for.

 

[svv]

On the game I'm playing now I have plenty of gold, so maintaining by big army with pacificsm was not a problem. But, I took a big happiness hit when I went from free religion to pacifism, I guess because all those side religions (which I had been spamming with missionaries to fuel my shrines) stopped providing happiness.

After I started expanding a bit more to get resources, and started getting the first of the media wonders (Broadway, Rock and Roll, Hollywood), I was able to switch back to pacifism and have happiness under control even in my largest cities (the shrine city has a 32 population).

 

[Drake007]

For philosophical civs pacifism is obviously much less appealing then for non-philosophical ones.

yeah, in my current SE game with Alexander i never used pacifism. put me in the same situation with a non-philo civ though, and i think i would have.

its crazy, my army's additional cost under pacifism is about 5x what i save from the no upkeep. using it would make my research rate drop by like 30% (i know its not so much important in an SE, but still). yet i still feel tempted to use it, with all those 3-4 specialists cities i have (not to mention the great library + national epic one..).

i think this debate is about what to do in the middle ages, cuz later the army's cost is way too much, free religion is available, and those great dudes take longer to get anyway. also, if you have enough GS for education, printing press and chemistry then additional ones are not as game-breaking.

 

[cabert]

Doesn't Pacifism only charge you for military outside of your territory?

Wodan

no, you get charged for outside borders even without pacifism
With pacifism, you get charged for every military unit.

 

[Mr. Civtastic]

Im wrapping up a game with Frederick (phi/org) and I can afford a large army. Ive run pacifism almost as soon as I got it. A couple things I did...

1. I had a couple cottage cities with all the money buildings.
2. I ran free market.
3. I kept good relations with everyone, which wasnt too hard because I had tech to offer because my research was crazy with lots of gs, and I had three religions so I had allies. All this meant more trade.
4. Run great merchants or great prophets. I ran caste system most of the game. I would put a great merchant in my smaller cities so as to capitalize on some money while at the same time not "pollute" my gp farms.
5. My ne city had 3 prophets and 2 merchants who joined my city.

 

[Landmonitor]

I played a very successful great plains monarch map with Alexander (Having 4 cows, horses, wheat, AND iron in my capital lowered the actual difficulty to noble I think!).

Anyway, I managed to get pyramids and run representatin early and had basically a SE, but as I always do with a SE, I set up many cottages but nonetheless kept my science slider low. By the time I got pacifism, I adopted it to really hammer out great people, and the large army I was running never became a problem (although I mitigated this a bit with vassalage; those free units are now twice as possible). Additionally, I got a double shrine in my great person farm... which along with I think 4 settled great merchants was pretty sweet for income... especially once wall street was built next to my national epic.

So basically, it worked very well in that situation. I had at least 4 cities that had relatively early cottages (probably founded between 500 BC and 500 AD; this was a raging barbs map and that slowed down settlement), and those cities still maanged to run the mandatory two scientists per city. However, given my luck with the starting position and then also getting a double holy city in my GP farm, this was as close to ideal as things can get, so I'm not sure that it's a great example... anyway...

I think the mot generally applicable thing I learned from trying to have an aggressive pacifist is that vassalage is almost a must-have. It probably brings in more money than the bonus commerce in the capital from beauracracy would because of lowered army maintenance and it also makes your soldiers come out better (since you've already ruled out theocrazy).

 

[CookieCutter]

Good point. I usually neglect vassalage. I will give it a try in my next game

 

[aelf]

Pacifism is certainly worth it if you built the Great Library. The great thing is they both lie along the same tech branch.